A review by chillcox15
In Full Velvet by Jenny Johnson

4.0

One of the many impressive things about this Jenny Johnson is the structure and organization of the poems in relation to each other here. It's a bit of an underrated aspect of writing a poetry collection, being able to order the poems so that they can flow or even tell a narrative (and doing so without it being so obvious that it's blunt trauma by verse). In In Full Velvet , Johnson opens with a series of poems abound with natural imagery and specifically various fauna, yet you don't get the vibe of a straight-down-the-line natural poetry. As the collection goes on, the natural and the animal eventually morph into more openly memoiristic poems that crystallize the romantic intricacies of lesbian relationships. The movement between these two threads is so well-balanced that you can barely feel it taking you as you dig deeper into this too-short collection, and then it moves back to animal poems by the end of the collection.